Kingdom Darkness
by WingLancir
Summary: Something of a sequel to Accordance. On its own, an Epic. Hypothetical KH3 or a rewrite of KH2 if you squint. 'Ware literary references, violence, canon raping, and YAOI.


_Take this kiss upon the brow!  
And, in parting from you now,  
Thus much let me avow-  
You are not wrong, who deem  
That my days have been a dream;  
Yet if hope has flown away  
In a night, or in a day,  
In a vision, or in none,  
Is it therefore the less gone?  
All that we see or seem  
Is but a dream within a dream. _

I stand amid the roar  
Of a surf-tormented shore,  
And I hold within my hand  
Grains of the golden sand-  
How few! yet how they creep  
Through my fingers to the deep,  
While I weep- while I weep!  
O God! can I not grasp  
Them with a tighter clasp?  
O God! can I not save  
One from the pitiless wave?  
Is all that we see or seem  
But a dream within a dream? – Edgar Allen Poe

* * *

**KINGDOM DARKNESS**

_First Wave – Summer_

Summer in the archipelago was not, as so many supposed, the gorgeous tropical vacation sauna type that blew warm, comfortable breezes and baked (but never burned) your skin under the sun. Summer in the archipelago had no dial for bake. That was spring. In the summer the archipelago was set at a definitive fry, or sometimes grill, or even char when the weather was feeling particularly malicious. A person walking out of doors for the first time in the day might be flattened by the sheer wave of heat roiling off the ground.

Of course, if a person walking out of doors for the first time in the day felt any cooler breezes, he or she would immediately go back inside. It was storm season once more, and cooler breezes coming in off the ocean meant waves and screaming winds and fury. Although it was a difficult choice of preference when the sun was doing its best to cook one's brains inside their skull, the hot days at least came with no loss of life or property damage. Usually.

It was not a storm day today. The sun was high and the far-off sea calm and the wind all but dead, and everyone and everything with the tiniest instinct of self-preservation had fled to shade or air-conditioning.

All except the boy.

He was not what one would could a striking or remarkable boy; unless he was in motion the eye might well sweep past him in a crowd. He was young, all of fourteen. Well-made, blue eyed, with an honest, open face and brown hair in gravity defying spikes. Sweat had plastered it to his forehead and the back of his neck and he absently swiped at the annoyance every couple of minutes. He seemed to be concentrating very hard on his work, bent as he was above a patch of brightly colored flowers, a riot of large red, purple and white blossoms that was only one of about nine similar beds. He had been working them since early that morning and it showed. Dirt was smudged in streaks across his skin like war paint, his muscles shifted and protested the hard labor whenever he changed position. His bare shoulders had been burnt a painful cherry red, the color of forge iron; he would be very sorry for the next few days that he had ignored the ascending eye of the sun during an archipelago summer. He'd started out sensibly with a shirt but it lay tossed aside on the nearby grass, and he'd forgotten to bring any sunscreen along when he left the house that morning. He'd been in a little bit of a hurry, gardening gloves in hand and a neighbor's promise of twenty bucks for the favor echoing in his ears.

He stood up from his work and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead with the back of a dirt-stained glove. He took a step back to survey, squinting against the harsh light. Eight down, one to go. The man who owned this house and this lawn had been out maybe half an hour ago to exclaim over his progress, whistling and saying it was a miracle how far he'd gotten in this heat, if I'd known you were this capable, son, I'd have hired you to do the whole lot. But maybe that's a bit much for you, eh? Well, I'll throw in a tip anyway.

The boy had smiled politely. His name was Sora (though he'd had many others), and it took most of his willpower to keep the truth out of his expression: that a little bit of hard labor didn't even come close to what he was capable of.

He would have willingly taken the man up on his offer to do the rest of the lawn. Any excuse to escape the craziness of moving into a new house, even if escape meant venturing outside in this heat, was a welcome opportunity. Sora was not and had never been a shy child, but that didn't mean he enjoyed having to dodge sweaty, grunting workmen as they tromped about on their sweaty, grunting business. They were ripping up carpet in the basement today, or would be tomorrow, or something he couldn't quite recall his mom complaining to his dad about over dinner last night. They hadn't asked him to help. They never asked him to help. For him the move (the _completely unnecessary_ move, a little voice in his head insisted darkly) from their cozy beachfront two bedroom to a spacious, white-walled house further inland (safe from storms, his mother said, and he wanted to ask _what_ storms, but hadn't) had been a great long series of semi-polite requests to "be somewhere else for awhile, can't you?" and "will you please get out of the way before your father drops the coffee table, dear."

His friends had often joking called him simple for his honesty and his naiveté, but he could take a hint as well as the next guy when he was being bludgeoned over the head with it. He apologized to his parents for being in the way and made himself scarce, although not without some lingering, tentative offers to help 'whenever they needed it.' The noncommittal responses he received were somehow more dismissive than any flat out refusal.

Nothing for it, he supposed. And twenty bucks was twenty bucks, even if his shoulders were screaming and he'd be walking hunched over like an old man the next day. This neighborhood had a thing for extravagant landscaping, so it was probably only a matter of time before his mom spontaneously decided to keep up appearances and he'd be doing this for his own yard. Might as well start getting used to it.

He stretched deliberately, wincing at a series of popping noises down his spine. Fourteen years old and already his bones were protesting. Next thing he knew, he'd be able to forecast weather from the twinges in his joints.

"It must be awful to get old," he commented to the flowers as he crouched again, gloved hands parting the brightly colored heads with gentle precision to cull the sick and the dying blooms from the healthy. He had found, somewhat to his surprise, that he liked working with plants. There had not been much opportunity for it on a beachfront, but here everyone and their dog had at least two beds of some kind of ornamental flora, and they were all very keen to call him up and jovially ask if he wouldn't mind weeding or watering or transplanting, of course we'll pay you, son, there's a good lad.

After a while he had cautiously decided that he enjoyed the work, though he was careful never to advertise that too openly. Advertising enthusiasm for hard labor around his mom had never been a good idea, not to mention what everyone else might think. Kairi, he was sure, would find it amusing but charming, just as he was sure that Tidus and Wakka and probably everyone else would call him a sissy. And Riku, Riku would _definitely_ have …

His hands stilled among the blossoms. Now that he thought about it, he could remember Riku bent patiently over the bushes in his mother's garden, silver hair obscuring his eyes and his arms bloodied up to the elbows from the thorns. He remembered the look on Riku's face the day he'd answered the door with his arms full of white roses.

My mother's favorite, the other boy had explained defensively. The first kind of flowers my father gave to her. She puts vases of them everywhere but refuses to take care of them past that, and then I have to go to all this trouble…

Riku's father was dead, Sora knew. It was not something they'd ever actually spoken about, but he knew it nonetheless, and there was something silently compelling (or awful, he wasn't sure which) about the son that had been left behind caring for the roses his mother both loved and hated.

_Maybe,_ he thought, with his own hands full of purple and red like Kairi's hair and eyes, the colors of sunset and blood. Maybe Riku would understand after all.

He missed them. It was a silly, irrational thing, but he did. With the first three quarters of their summer having been …taken up, by other things (he never had asked what kind of spell it was that convinced their parents that the time they'd all three been off saving the world had been spent as part of some kind of summer exchange program for the school), it probably shouldn't have been any kind of surprise that Kairi and Riku's parents would decide to spend some quality time with their children. An extended vacation, begun not even two weeks after the end of the quest.

He told himself rationally that they wouldn't even be gone for all that long, not really, their getaways could hardly last for more than a few weeks, where they had gone (wherever it was that they had gone, he was sure they'd both told him but couldn't for the life of him remember what they'd said). And he should have been preoccupied enough with the move and the impending start of school. It should not have been a big deal that they weren't around.

But their absence grated on him. Like a bruise, or maybe a toothache, some low, dull pain that never quite faded from his senses and that he couldn't seem to stop poking at. It shook something in the center of his universe that they weren't close at hand, after everything he'd done to win them back from the crazy, Heartless-crawling, villain populated galaxy that had tried to take them away. He'd _won,_ hadn't he? And everyone knew that the winner, the hero, was supposed to get to take his princess (and/or his best friend, if that was how the story ran) and return home and they would live happily, etc etc, so on and so forth.

He yanked out a handful of thistly weed with more force than was strictly necessary and flung it into the weed bucket. He was aware that anyone else might have thought him childish for acting like this, but he couldn't help himself. It would hit him at the most unexpected times, usually after he'd scolded himself to deal with reality. He would see or do something and turn to say something about it to Riku, but Riku wasn't there, and then he would be forced to carefully catalogue the whateveritwas to tell the other boy about later, when he'd returned. Or he would ride past their houses in his old neighborhood on his bike (he was already dreading having to tell them that he'd moved while they'd been gone) and find himself stopping in the empty driveways, or automatically checking bedroom windows that he consciously knew were curtained closed. Any phone that rang in his house in the morning was sleepily answered with a query of their names before the person calling could even speak, and then he would flush red and stammer some embarrassed apology and hand the call off to whichever of his parents it had been for. With Riku and Kairi gone, no one ever called him at home.

It was more than just their absence, too. He didn't like to admit it to himself, but he was having a hard time coming back down from, well, the high that had been his other life. When he'd been the Keyblade Master. There'd been a reason that the three of them had wanted to set sail (escape, that voice said again) from their tiny island paradise on a raft, to get out there and see new worlds, to explore, and it wasn't because the archipelago offered a vast array of excitement and adventure and all those other things that young people naturally craved. Coming back home after the quest, the archipelago and the rigid confines of their old lives seemed even tinier and more constricting than they'd been when the three had left.

Clean your room, Sora. Mow the lawn, Sora. Finish your homework, Sora. You can go out and play with your little friends after you've done the dishes, Sora. Stay out of the movers' way, Sora, you're not strong enough to help. Be more responsible about things, Sora. When are you ever going to grow up, Sora?

Kairi and Riku were the only ones who didn't treat him like the same person he'd been before the quest. He _wasn't_ the same person he'd been before the quest, he couldn't possibly be, and maybe it bothered him that no one else seemed to be able to see how much he'd grown.

Actually, that wasn't quite true. There were those who had noticed a change in him, but it still wasn't the way he wished they would notice. His other childhood playmates, Selphie and Wakka and Tidus, indeed thought that he'd changed, but only in the aspect that he'd gotten a little strange and distant. A little more like Riku, Selphie had actually confessed to his astonished face one day. Like you're hiding secrets. It's just not like you.

He could protest all he liked that he wasn't _hiding_ anything. They didn't believe him. It didn't help that he was a horrible liar so whenever they asked him about the trip that had eaten up most of his fourteenth summer he would flounder and gabble out a self-contradicting and utterly lame story, different each time. They'd eventually just stopped asking. Wherever it was that he'd gone for his 'exchange program' had, in their opinions, changed him irrevocably, and not for the better.

Wakka had boxed his ears hard enough to make them ring one day when they'd been playing. Kid stuff of course, mock-combat, and Sora must have been distracted, because he slipped back into the kind of mental coldness, the battle calm that Leon had beaten into his skull, and the next thing he knew Tidus had been on the ground with both hands clapped over his face and blood squirting out between his fingers and Selphie looking white and horrified and Wakka was roaring something and he'd had nothing, nothing at all to say for himself.

Don't you know how to pull your punches, Wakka had shouted, glaring at him like he'd done it deliberately. Were you trying to break his face?

Part of him had been horrified right along with Selphie and angry right along with Wakka, the old anger that had used to burn him up when Riku would smack him just a little harder than he could take along the side of his head so he reeled and saw stars. Just to prove he could. Just to put Sora in his place.

Part of him had been fiercely triumphant. He was stronger than any of them now, and they ought to recognize it.

He'd stuttered out an apology and fled. Away from Wakka's accusations, away from the flash of fear in Selphie's expression (that was what frightened him more than anything), away from the blood on the ground and the way Tidus' blue eyes couldn't seem to focus. Sora's own madhouse of a home was not an option, nor were Kairi and Riku's, so he'd just grabbed his bike and flew, pedaling into the wind as fast as he could without knowing or caring where he was going.

When the bike's front tire skidded on loose gravel and sent him flying, it seemed like a perfect crappy ending to a perfectly crappy day. He sprawled full length on the unfamiliar dirt road, rocks digging into his bare skin and blood oozing from various scrapes, and laughed until it hurt too much to breathe.

"Just think," he gasped out to the empty air, still sniggering. "Just think, this was _exactly_ what you saved the universe for."

Tidus was a good sport about it. He waited until two days later and then jumped Sora when he was alone, and proceeded to wail the shit out of him. At least until Sora actually started fighting back, and then they brawled like dogs in the street, spitting blood and ripping handfuls of hair and it came to a draw and Tidus was evidently satisfied with that. Their parents let them have it for fighting. Wakka didn't speak to Sora for a day. Selphie looked back and forth between the three of them, at a loss as the only mediator with Kairi gone, before throwing up her hands and muttering about idiots and bonding rituals.

He wasn't exactly avoiding them now. Not really. He'd be seeing enough of them when school started again. He was just ..busy. Keeping busy. Killing time, doing whatever he could, waiting for Riku and Kairi to come back so he would stop feeling the way he did and stop acting the way he was. He figured he owed Tidus and Selphie and Wakka that much until he could get over himself.

The boys dismissed this as 'whatever floats your boat, man,' but Selphie had taken offense to what she was calling Sora's 'martyr complex.' Moping over all that _again,_ she accused, hands on her hips and that annoying emotional radar that girls had apparently cranked up to eleven. Aren't we your friends too?

Yes, he wanted to say, touched and annoyed by her insistence at the same time. Yes, but you weren't the friends that I saved the world for.

But he didn't say that. He would never say that. He had fought for their sakes too, for his parents and the people he knew in town and everyone on the archipelago, if only in a general sense.

And yet ….

_"You've changed, you know. We can't ever tell what you're thinking now." _

He avoided Selphie's entirely too empathic gaze, wishing Kairi or someone was here to back him up. It was hard, harder than he'd ever thought it would be, to talk to people who so completely and utterly misunderstood him. Who looked at him and saw only the boy (which he was), not the legendary Keyblade Master or the fighter that had taken down Ansem (which he also was). He couldn't exactly come out and tell Selphie that he was restless, that the home he'd fought so hard to restore seemed tiny and stifling and even alien to him now, that he missed his companions, Leon and Yuffie and Cid and Aerith and the King's men, that he missed exploring strange and dangerous worlds, that he even missed the thrill of fighting for his life, that he missed being a part of something larger than himself, that he'd spent so long listening to other people rant about great destinies (specifically his own) that he couldn't just forget and wind back down to this…this curse of normality like nothing ever happened.

"See, you're doing it again."

He started, flushed, and then shrugged self-consciously. "Sorry."

There was a line between her eyebrows when she frowned, he noticed, not sure why he'd never seen it before. Perhaps because she'd never been this close. Her green eyes were darker than Riku's aquamarine, not the color of sky or sea but the green of deep forests and the moss that grew in the secret cave. "You don't have to be sorry," she said, something like nervousness or concern chasing across her face. Her fingers had crept to his arm. "I guess you can't help it. It…it's just …"

He stared at her, puzzled. She saw the incomprehension and smiled an odd, sad little smile. Her hand dropped away.

"We're just worried about you, Sora. That's all."

That made him feel guilty for reasons he didn't understand, but he didn't say anything. He continued not to say anything as she sat there and fidgeted, and it was a relief to both of them when Tidus called her and she could dash off to re-join their game. They were too far for Sora to hear all of what was said when she reached them, but Wakka cracked something involving the word 'puberty' and he could hear her outraged shriek of denial as clearly as if she'd been still next to him. She flounced off after reducing Wakka to a wheezing pile in the dirt and he watched her go, unconsciously rubbing at his arm where she'd touched him.

That was another reason why he wanted Riku and Kairi to come back. Everything and everyone in this place had just plain gotten _weird_ without them around. His parents with this sudden, inexplicable move inland. His old friends with this gulf that had sprung up between them. Himself, with this nagging feeling of anxiety. This discontent with what should have been his hero's reward.

The flowers nodded in the hint of a breeze that barely stirred his sweat soaked bangs, but he lifted his face into it anyway, trying to scent the ocean.

Nothing. Wrong direction or too far away, or both.

He knelt in the sun warmed earth, leaning down so close to the plants that it looked as though he were trying to hide his face in the bright petals or hunt for a particularly tricksome weed hiding under all the growth, or both. Only the flowers heard what he whispered.

_"I wish I'd never come back."_


End file.
